As for whether he's a composite of people I know, or whether he's me, let me just say: Yes. Plus, No.

Much of academia seems obsessed with race, class, and sex but this work, while touching on all those subjects, isn?t really in that multicultural/PC vein. Did you set out to tackle these issues in a unique way?

Yes. Actually, it was when I discovered the whole idea of this racial remediation instructor that the novel took off, for me. Because it seemed to me that race--the facts of race, the mythology surrounding race, everything--has changed somewhat in our country, but much of our literature had not. Racism is an enormous evil in our country--our biggest evil--but literature still abides by a kind of To Kill a Mockingbird approach to it. As long as racism is identified and punished, this literature suggests, than it isn't really a problem anymore. Lamar was a manifestation of my dissatisfaction with this kind of fiction: it's not that Lamar doesn't think racism is evil, etc.; it's that he's not sure what to do about it, and he's not sure what he might do would end up accomplishing anything. This is a much scarier and realistic and compicated prospect, to me, than Gregory Peck in a courtroom standing up for What is Right.

Cincinnati has had its share of race problems of late; did they impact your writing? Is there a difference between urban race issues and rural/small town ones?

I wrote The Ordinary White Boy before I moved to Cincinnati, although you're right, of course, in that race being one of my abiding concerns as a writer and Cincinnati certainly has had its share of race problem and so the whole matter seems as urgent here as it has anywhere else I've lived. But there is a lag for me--I didn't write about upstate New York until after I'd moved from it; I didn't set stories in South Carolina until after I'd lived there for three years. I've lived in Cincinnati for two plus years and have just now finished my first story about Cincinnati. It's called "The Price of the Haircut" and is, no big surprise, about the riots, or at least influenced by the city's very odd, sometimes very disturbing reaction to the riots.

As for whether race is different in the country as opposed to the city: certainly, but I'm not in a position, really, to say absolutely what these differences are. As the novel shows, I hope, I distrust the racial remediator (and her twin brother, the racial theorist) in most of us and am loathe to give in to the temptation to act like I know what I'm talking about.

In the book, Lamar discovers that innocence is meaningless. What does he mean by that?

This is one of the things I liked best about Lamar. He is innocent in a way: he's done nothing terribly wrong, except broken a few hearts, which all of us do anyway. And he certainly isn't like his uncle, who burns down the black family's house and is sent to prison for it. And yet, he's haunted by what his uncle's done, haunted by the town's reaction to it; whether he had anything directly to do with the crime is besides the point. The crime is his, it involves him, implicates him by blood, by association and proximity and he's better off admitting it. Of course, admitting it and doing something about it are two different things. Gregory Peck would had done something about it, and he's a better man than my Lamar, but I didn't want to write about a better man.

A great many characters in literature escape their ordinariness by leaving a small town for the big city. Does Lamar embrace his ordinariness? If so, why? Is ordinary the same as mediocre?